witches. Item tertium: that since your childhood, M’rta has rubbed your face and hands with an ointment whose secret is known only to the T?nd’r. Aristotle would tell us that the conclusion is inevitable. But the evidence of the eyes is more convincing than logic. Give me your finger.”
“My finger?” Ersz’bet stared at the thorn that Cec’lia was holding. Was this a meeting of witches after all? Witches stole the blood of baptized children to make their bread. Herman had told her that, when he had called her a witch.
“Let me do it, Erszike.” And this was strange, because M’rta had never even allowed her to sew, for fear that she would spoil her fingers. Perhaps she should run away from these witches, as she had run away from the landgravine. But she felt so sleepy, leaning her head against the trunk of the tree. How much honey wine had she drunk?
A drop of blood ran into her palm, leaving a trail behind it, like a snail moving over a stone. It was a clear and shining green. Suddenly the effect of the honey wine left her, and she understood.
“Then why don’t I have green hair?”
“Your mother’s hair was as green as mine,” said Cec’lia. “Look around at our company.” The children were sleeping at the edge of the firelight, the oldest girl still holding the baby in her arms. The peddler had made a pillow out of his sack. Only the man who had played the Devil still sat piping, like a plaintive bird. “Some of us are lucky. S’ndor’s hair is brown, and his eyes have enough brown in them that he can pass as an ordinary man. But you see his youngest, little Juli. Some of us must hide in the forest, for fear of being identified as a witch. Although the landgrave ordered that witches cannot be burned, they can be driven away. S’ndor’s wife, the mother of those children, was killed two summers ago by a miller’s dog.”
S’ndor stopped his piping to throw another branch on the fire. Before he began piping again, he touched the baby’s hair, ruffling it like spring grass. The beggar moved in her sleep, muttering something that sounded like a song M’rta had sung to Ersz’bet when she was a child.
“You, Ersz’bet, look more like your father than your mother,” Cec’lia continued. “With the help of M’rta’s ointment you can even handle metal, although it could not protect your mother from the prick of a knife. She did not die of her wounds but of poison, since metal is poison to us. How we appear depends on whether both of our parents were T?nd’r, and both of their parents. But all of us have the blood of the T?nd’r in us, what the Inquisition calls the witch blood: the blood of the Moon. M’rta’s father was not of the T?nd’r, but mine was. I could not live at the Wartburg, as she does.” Cec’lia smiled. “Don’t you recognize me, Ersz’bet? We’ve met before.” She reached behind her and picked up a piece of gray cloth, then draped it over her head like a veil. “Now?”
And suddenly Erzs’bet remembered where she had seen that mouth. It had been praying in the Chapel of Saint Anne at the Abbey. She had watched it because she had been bored, and the alternative was to look at the landgravine. “If they knew that the Abbess of Erfurt …”
“Sit still,” said M’rta, who was still holding a handkerchief to her finger. “I don’t want you to start bleeding again.”
“Then there would be no one at the Abbey to help the T?nd’r. Old Ildiko there, who can’t help singing the songs of the T?nd’r in her sleep, would no longer be able to beg on the Abbey steps or curl beside our kitchen fire. She would be cast into the street, and if the Inquisition found her …” The lines around her mouth became lines of anger. “I was born after the witch trials, but M’rta remembers.”
M’rta looked down at her hands. “I was only a girl when the Inquisitor came to our town. My father was a baker; he had money to send me and my mother to N?rnberg. For that, he was burned in the marketplace, although his blood was as red as the priest’s.”
“Like my father sent me away.” Erzs’bet put her face in her hands.
“You think you’re so smart, don’t you?” said Csilla.
“What do you mean?” asked Mrs. Mad’r.
“Getting me to tell Erzs’bet’s story because you want me to talk about my father. He sent me away just like King Andr’s send Erzs’bet away. Well, I think he should have kept her in Hungary!”
Mrs. Mad’r shook her head. She looked, Csilla thought, like the mathematics teacher at her school, when she had hopelessly muddled a multiplication problem. “Then she would have been killed, just as her mother the queen was killed. Csilla, you must understand that the Inquisition was burning anyone identified as a witch. And the easiest way to be a witch was to be one of the T?nd’r. We have always been hiding, always fleeing, since the days of the Daughters of the Moon. Your father was working to change that. He was writing a book—”
“I know,” said Csilla. “He worked on it all day long, and sometimes all night long.” She would wake in the darkness and hear the sound of the typewriter. So she would put on the sweater that her grandmother had worn on days when the apartment was cold, walk down the hall to the kitchen, turn on the old stove, and boil the water for tea. When she brought it to him, he would look at her with that tired look in his eyes, her handsome Papa, and say, “Thank you, Csillike. You are my own guardian angel, aren’t you?”
In the mornings, she would make his lunch so that he would eat something while she was at school, but often when she came home, she would find the bean soup cold, the brown bread gone stale. “You forgot to eat again,” she would say, accusingly. “Have you been typing all day?”
“I’m so sorry, Csillike,” he would answer. “I seem to have forgotten some of the details of Szent Erzs’bet’s story. Could you sit beside me and tell me if I have the name of the Abbess right? I promise I’ll eat whatever you made me, no matter how cold it is.”
“It was a book about the T?nd’r. He was writing down all of my grandmother’s stories. I used to help him with it.”
“Help him?” said Mrs. Mad’r. “How did you help him, Csilla?”
Csilla looked at Mrs. Mad’r curiously. She was leaning forward in her chair, no longer the disapproving teacher. Instead, she sounded like an eager child. “Well, not really help. I mean not with the typing or anything. But when he forgot something, or got something wrong, I told him how the stories went. My grandmother told them to me, and she made me tell them to her, so many times! I don’t think I could forget them if I tried.”
“Oh, my dear,” said Mrs. Mad’r. “Don’t you know why your father sent you away? He sent us a message, but messages are so difficult. They have to be—well, not exactly clear, in case the wrong person reads them. He said he was writing down his mother’s stories, the whole history of the T?nd’r. We’ve never had a history, just stories, Csilla. Stories remembered by the old people, because the young had so many other things to think about, and when something was forgotten, it was forgotten forever. In Erzs’bet’s time the church burned everything written about the T?nd’r, and even now in Hungary books about the T?nd’r are banned. They cannot be published or sold because the state believes that we do not exist. Can you imagine what that means to us? We have been hiding and fleeing so long that the T?nd’r are scattered now, over Europe and here in America. Without a history, how can we know who we are, or find each other again? Your father was trying to teach us. His message—it was so difficult to understand. First we heard he was sending us a copy of his manuscript. Then Helga said he was sending us his daughter. And then there you were—”
“In my science class,” said Csilla, “the teacher told us that the T?nd’r had a genetic defect. That we were …sick, not as strong as other people because we had bad genes. She said everything could be explained scientifically.”
“Do you believe that?” asked Mrs. Mad’r.
“I don’t know,” said Csilla.”My father believes in the stories, and he’s a professor at the university. But of course, he’s a philosophy professor, and not at all practical. He can’t even keep his socks mended. If the stories are real, what happened to M’rta’s ointment? I mean, there’s nothing like that now.”
“It’s another thing we’ve lost,” said Mrs. Mad’r. “That’s why the stories are so important.”
Csilla said, suddenly, “Did you know my name, when you told me about the Daughters of the Moon? Or did you really think I could be named T?nde”
“No,” said Mrs. Mad’r, “not exactly. But in his message your father referred to a guiding star—another thing I didn’t understand at the time. Csilla—star. And so I guessed. I thought if I told you about the bravery of another Csilla, you might respond. About your father—you have to understand that he was in great danger, of going to prison or worse. But he was very brave.”
“I could have been brave too,” said Csilla.
“I’m sure he knew that,” said Mrs. Mad’r. “But like the king of Hungary, he loved his daughter too much to put her in danger. And like Erzs’bet, you’re going to have to make a choice.”
When Erzs’bet could not sleep, M’rta would stroke her hair and tell her about the Daughters of the Moon or
